Post by Admin on Jul 3, 2021 17:31:22 GMT
Recognise the creativity behind crime, then you can thwart it
psyche.co/ideas/recognise-the-creativity-behind-crime-then-you-can-thwart-it
When Sputnik launched in October 1957, the Western world reacted with shock. How could the Soviet Union have won the first leg of the space race? How was the United States, with all its technological and economic might, beaten into space? One answer was that creativity was the culprit: more specifically, a lack of it among US engineers.
But what is creativity? It turned out that the field of psychology already had an answer. In 1950, J P Guilford, president of the American Psychological Association, had described his dissatisfaction with conventional explanations of human intellectual ability. They focused on convergent thinking: the ability to find and reproduce the right answer, such as 2 + 2 = 4. That’s vital to our lives, but Guilford argued that it’s not all that matters. Our ability to generate many possible answers to a problem is also important – in other words, divergent thinking. If the question is ‘What equals 4?’ there is no single, correct answer. It could be 2 + 2, but it could also be 3 + 1, or even 0.25 + 3.75. Divergent thinking would come to be seen as a hallmark of creativity.
Modern psychology’s approach to creativity was born in 1950, but it was the Sputnik shock of 1957 that turned attention to the role that creativity plays in the real world. Over the following decades, psychologists would come to understand that creativity is not merely a matter of how we think, but also a function of our personalities (some people are inclined to be more open-minded than others) and where we work or learn (some environments are more conducive to creativity than others, for example through encouraging free thinking). When all of these factors are favourably aligned, people are more likely to be able to generate ideas and products that solve problems in new and useful ways.
Defined this way, creativity has been associated strongly with beneficial outcomes. Whether the problem we are trying to solve is artistic (eg, how to capture the beauty of a landscape) or technological (eg, how to power a labour-saving machine), creativity leads to solutions that are new, unusual and surprising. Lives are improved as a result.
But then, on 11 September 2001, a small group of men hijacked four commercial aircraft. They flew two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City; a third into the headquarters of the US Military, the Pentagon; and crashed the last into the Pennsylvania countryside, its intended target thought to be the White House. They killed 2,977 people, injured more than 6,000 and caused more than $40 billion in damage, including collapsing the Twin Towers and destroying part of the Pentagon. No less important was how the event inflicted lasting psychological and economic damage. These men demonstrated that the problems people seek to solve, and the solutions they generate, don’t have to be good. The competitive advantages of creativity are not confined to benign enterprises doing decent things. Creativity also has a dark side.
It’s true that, prior to the 9/11 attacks, researchers understood that creativity could result in bad outcomes. Their idea of negative creativity acknowledged that, even with the best will in the world, there could be unintended, undesirable consequences from creative solutions. The internal combustion engine has had an enormous, positive impact on the lives of billions of people. Yet every year, tens of thousands of people die as a result of car crashes, and our planet’s atmosphere is choked with harmful emissions. Even so, we’d never claim that George Brayton – the American inventor of the first liquid-fuelled internal combustion engine in 1872 – was trying to kill people. There was a negative element to his creativity, but not a malevolent one.
The 9/11 attacks were different. The death and destruction seen on that day was not an unfortunate byproduct of flying planes into buildings. It was the deliberate, intended purpose of terrorists. This was an example of what my colleagues and I have called ‘malevolent creativity’ in action.
psyche.co/ideas/recognise-the-creativity-behind-crime-then-you-can-thwart-it
When Sputnik launched in October 1957, the Western world reacted with shock. How could the Soviet Union have won the first leg of the space race? How was the United States, with all its technological and economic might, beaten into space? One answer was that creativity was the culprit: more specifically, a lack of it among US engineers.
But what is creativity? It turned out that the field of psychology already had an answer. In 1950, J P Guilford, president of the American Psychological Association, had described his dissatisfaction with conventional explanations of human intellectual ability. They focused on convergent thinking: the ability to find and reproduce the right answer, such as 2 + 2 = 4. That’s vital to our lives, but Guilford argued that it’s not all that matters. Our ability to generate many possible answers to a problem is also important – in other words, divergent thinking. If the question is ‘What equals 4?’ there is no single, correct answer. It could be 2 + 2, but it could also be 3 + 1, or even 0.25 + 3.75. Divergent thinking would come to be seen as a hallmark of creativity.
Modern psychology’s approach to creativity was born in 1950, but it was the Sputnik shock of 1957 that turned attention to the role that creativity plays in the real world. Over the following decades, psychologists would come to understand that creativity is not merely a matter of how we think, but also a function of our personalities (some people are inclined to be more open-minded than others) and where we work or learn (some environments are more conducive to creativity than others, for example through encouraging free thinking). When all of these factors are favourably aligned, people are more likely to be able to generate ideas and products that solve problems in new and useful ways.
Defined this way, creativity has been associated strongly with beneficial outcomes. Whether the problem we are trying to solve is artistic (eg, how to capture the beauty of a landscape) or technological (eg, how to power a labour-saving machine), creativity leads to solutions that are new, unusual and surprising. Lives are improved as a result.
But then, on 11 September 2001, a small group of men hijacked four commercial aircraft. They flew two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City; a third into the headquarters of the US Military, the Pentagon; and crashed the last into the Pennsylvania countryside, its intended target thought to be the White House. They killed 2,977 people, injured more than 6,000 and caused more than $40 billion in damage, including collapsing the Twin Towers and destroying part of the Pentagon. No less important was how the event inflicted lasting psychological and economic damage. These men demonstrated that the problems people seek to solve, and the solutions they generate, don’t have to be good. The competitive advantages of creativity are not confined to benign enterprises doing decent things. Creativity also has a dark side.
It’s true that, prior to the 9/11 attacks, researchers understood that creativity could result in bad outcomes. Their idea of negative creativity acknowledged that, even with the best will in the world, there could be unintended, undesirable consequences from creative solutions. The internal combustion engine has had an enormous, positive impact on the lives of billions of people. Yet every year, tens of thousands of people die as a result of car crashes, and our planet’s atmosphere is choked with harmful emissions. Even so, we’d never claim that George Brayton – the American inventor of the first liquid-fuelled internal combustion engine in 1872 – was trying to kill people. There was a negative element to his creativity, but not a malevolent one.
The 9/11 attacks were different. The death and destruction seen on that day was not an unfortunate byproduct of flying planes into buildings. It was the deliberate, intended purpose of terrorists. This was an example of what my colleagues and I have called ‘malevolent creativity’ in action.